The media in the US and other NATO countries have reached a moral consensus, so they are leaving out the parts that are hard to hear. “Putin’s Russia” is like a thread that ties together the essential feelings from the war with a hatred of all Russians, past and present. A notable exception has been made for brave Russians who publicly protest or disgruntled citizens who have left the nation or intend to do so soon. How many are left for us to despise? Possibly a good number.

The Gettleman story came from Soledar, a town in the Donetsk Oblast of eastern Ukraine, about 80 miles northwest of Luhansk. Since 2014, when a government that doesn’t like Russia came to power, residents of Solar have been fighting with the Ukrainian army. However, the narrative makes a mystery out of an older woman who refused to immediately comply with Ukrainian orders to remove all non-Russians. It’s possible that the lonely woman the American soldier and the reporter met on the road didn’t want to follow those orders and leave her home (with no hope of ever going back), preferring instead to take a chance that the Russian army would spare it. Not a peasant mystery, this. It resembled a calculation more than anything else.

Why have these perceptual mistakes become so prevalent? The reason is that they agree with the list of accepted truths chosen by liberal-corporate media. We learn about the anti-war demonstrations in Russia; about the generals’ and people’s resentment toward Putin, who wants him to be more decisive; and about the increasing persecution and censorship inside Russia. All of this is legitimate press freedom work. Ukraine, too? We don’t hear much about the country’s censorship, the fact that opposition political parties are illegal, the fact that men of military age can’t leave the country, or the fact that a law made Ukrainian the required language for public employees, making Russian less important in Donetsk and Luhansk and making the conflict worse. (Think about what would happen if Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California made it illegal to speak Spanish.) We no longer hear about the killing of Ukrainian mayors who weren’t anti-Russian enough, and the history and politics of the Azov Battalion are no longer talked about in the news (except for the occasional subordinate phrase).

Present problem

None of these facts excuses Russia’s actions in any way. But again, these are realities that should be recognized by the people of a nation that is on track to send $100 billion in aid and arms to Ukraine to prolong this war. Such facts are part of the current crisis, and it is the job of honest journalists to show them. The defeat of Russia has suddenly become more critical to the West than climate change, nuclear disarmament, the prevention of starvation in Africa, and many other causes that cannot be thought of honestly without a recognition that they stand in some tension with unconditional victory over Russia, which means full publicity must also be given to facts that are inconvenient to your position—in this case, your loyal membership in the West.

People who call “Putin’s Russia” a “totalitarian regime” don’t seem to know what the word “totalitarian” means. In fact, since the start of the conflict, Russia’s authoritarian censorship and barriers to dissent have gotten a lot worse. Even so, there have been protests in Russia, and neither the protesters nor most people who watched have been arrested. Media experts and the group of military, think tanks, and academic experts who call Russia totalitarian should look at the histories of Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany to see if they can find anything similar. In a recent NPR show, a Ukrainian family went to the bombed-out city of Mariupol. Even though they returned freely, they blamed the Russians for the harm. Because they believed Mariupol to be their home, even while Russian soldiers took it, they decided to leave their haven in Warsaw, where permanent asylum was possible. How many residents of cities taken over by the armies of Stalin or Hitler ever opted to return?

It was an international war of aggression when Russia invaded Ukraine in February. It was not, however, unprovoked. Since the change in government in 2014 and the series of military clashes with Russia, Ukraine has constantly fired artillery into the Donbas region. If it weren’t for the fact that the US doesn’t recognize Ukraine as an independent country outside of NATO and Russia doesn’t recognize Ukraine as a member of the EU, Recep Erdogan and Volodymyr Zelensky would have reportedly reached an agreement in late March to try to end the conflict, with a proposed cease-fire meant to clear the way for talks. The US sent the British Prime Minister at the time, Boris Johnson, to try to ruin the deal and convince Zelensky that a cease-fire was not a good idea for the West. Whether or not you think it’s a war crime, it’s wrong to make the war last longer on purpose. We assert that we act in this way because Ukraine desires it. But like there is no proof that the people of Russia wanted the invasion in February, there is no proof that the people of Ukraine want a long-lasting war.

The image that has kept us hostage is of the Second World War. Since then, every dictator has resembled either Hitler or Stalin. So, every desire to fight back becomes an urgent need since the only other choice is to give in. The image seemed to correspond to actual events throughout the Cold War, but even after it was over, the idea kept us hostage. During the Vietnam War, the Second World War myth dimmed many intelligent people’s intellect. The same switch was flipped in response to any subsequent hostility by a hostile non-Western government for which the US had an apparent moral justification as well as an economic or political reason to intervene: 1938 was the year once more, and Munich was the diplomatic event. We have turned to Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, and Vladimir Putin as potential replacements for Adolf Hitler. Or a fresh Stalin, for that matter. In a March 2014 column, George Will described Putin as “Stalin’s spawn.”

Will declared that “the behaviour of the Russian army in Ukraine demonstrates…a centuries-old continuity: a culture of cruelty” in his column on October 7th, 2008, eight years later. In other words, to be Russian means to be harsh, as the stories of the crimes in Bucha show. “Putin’s Russia has a metabolic need to export its pathologies,” reads the medical diagnostic. Now, though, consider the effects of the “metabolic drive.” It’s like the old saying that men of darker skin tones have a built-in, uncontrollable desire for white women. When you combine the natural style of this amateur analysis with the word “endemic,” you get what is known as “nation-as-race” or “race-as-virus” thinking. Some Jews were referred to as “bacilli” in the 1930s. Hatred is a powerful emotion.

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Try to bring things back to a human scale. Anyone who lived through the 1980s will remember that American leaders were asked to get over the “Vietnam syndrome” or to bring back the sense of pride that lets a great country fight its good wars. We were told that the US invasion of Panama and the subsequent Gulf War had successfully eliminated this disease. When you read Svetlana Alexievich’s book Secondhand Time, which is about the sad history of real Russians, you can see how crazy it must seem to them that conflict can be a healthy way to heal. During World War II, about 21 million Soviet citizens died. This is hard for us to accept, but the Soviet Union alone was more responsible than any other country for the defeat of fascism. The academics and journalists who have referred to Russia as a fascist nation are dangerously using language. They get away with it because most Americans only know the Second World War as a myth and because, for many, fighting is simply a faraway dream.

On October 6, President Biden stated, “I’m trying to figure out what Putin’s off-ramp is.” Instead of trying to beat Russia on its border, it might be a better use of his time to figure out how we can get off the road. The Russians must have been curious about how far the US would go in the cause of non-appeasement and reorganising the world after the US withdrew from the INF Treaty in 2019 and the Open Skies Treaty in 2020 because the dismantling of post-Soviet Russia has been nearly openly stated American goal since the second NATO expansion in 2004, a plan that has already been partially realized and that no conceivable Russian leader will allow the US to accomplish. And even if it were feasible to knock Russia to its knees militarily and economically, what would happen next? As a result of Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and the destruction of the Crimea bridge and the Nord Stream pipelines, neither side will be able to accept a compromise for long. Nobody seems to have given it much thought.

Analysis by: Advocacy Unified Network